HSE- Friendly Lubricants to Safeguard Environment and Enhance Operational Excellence

Abstract

The increasing use of ecofriendly chemicals and fluid additives for exploration and exploitation of oil and gas resources in onshore and offshore environments needs the development and/or identification of novel HSE-friendly chemicals and additives to improve operational excellence and safeguard the global environment. Hence, a suite of novel HSE friendly lubricants have been developed for exploration and exploitation of oil and gas resources without causing any damage and degradation to other marine and terrestrial resources. This paper describes the development, testing and evaluation of several HSE friendly lubricants that have been developed using waste cooking oil as the raw material. Physical and chemical processing of waste cooking oil available from the food and catering industry as a waste by- product have led to the development of several HSE-friendly lubricants to be in the forefront of best drilling practices. Due to the green nature of the products, they will have positive impact on the workers’ health, rig site safety, and the surrounding environment.Experimental results obtained by conducting industry standard lubricity tests indicate that the newly developed HSE-friendly lubricants have similar or better performance compared to the currently used equivalent lubricants and thus demonstrated their potential as the viable alternatives to equivalent commercial products. Due to the health, safety and environment-friendly nature of the newly developed lubricant products, they will ensure the exploration and exploitation of oil and gas resources with positive impact on the preservation of other marine and terrestrial resources and thus expected to safeguard the global environment and ecosystems. Due to the high potential of the lubricants to improve the interface lubrication of mating surfaces, they are expected to play an effective role in mitigating the torque and drag in deviated, horizontal, extended reach, multi-lateral and also vertical wells with high dog-leg severity while drilling, pulling and running the drill string into the wellbore.